GT-3 Madrid-Barcelona

We are neurospicy creatures of habit so OSOM and Umami again for our final breakfast in Madrid. Madrid was very good to us. We felt very much at home at our Madrid hotel - beautiful flowing room with natural light and a balcony to let the good vibes of Madrid in. Props to addled, overworked receptionist for getting us a better room. Today is a travel day. We need to catch a high speed train to Barcelona, leaving from Madrid’s famous Atocha station, to overnight in Barcelona before catching the ferry to Civitavecchia (pay attention, this place squats stubbornly in our collective memory) late the following evening. 

Always Be Schleppin'

We completed our first backpack-laden cross city hike to the train station. Our mishmash of rucksacks, frontloaded backpacks, duffel bags, totes, handbags and fanny packs in transit was a sight to behold. I was really looking forward to transiting through Atocha. I’d seen many photos and heard many things and it’s a very beautiful building. 

Unfortunately she’s not looking her best at the minute having been gutted for refurbishment. It’s basically a building site in full swing moonlighting as an extremely busy European train station. Of course we were early. 

Peanut Hunting

 

Peanut Gathering

Snoopy and Peanuts became a feature of the trip, for D in particular and her first Peanuts purchase was made at the station gift shop along with a big bag of Haribos for the trip. Another common theme of the trip was arched necks watching the electronic departures board for the platform announcement, then yelling PLATFORM#!! before setting out at a gallop, maximally handicapped with our luggage. 

Leaving Atocha's Never Easy

All our seats were pre-booked so no reason for such silly military manoeuvres really, but where’s the fun in no silly military manoeuvres? 

Today I spent 8am to 11am DYING to board the train. Spent from 1120 to 1500 dying to get off it. It’s an affliction which serves the purpose of driving us on, but fuck me it’s an affliction. At Atocha we discovered Rail Hostesses are a thing. Rail companies have a team of attendants for each long haul train journey and the sashay through the chaos of a building site trying to evoke the air of their glamourous airborne cousins.

 We pulled out to the sound of Avalanches: Thank You Caroline a beautiful exit soundtrack for Madrid. 

 

Beautiful, Beguiling Zaragoza (Station)

The train ride took under 3hrs and passed through Zaragoza. A shame to pass through such an exotic sounding place and not explore. Next time. At one point the electronic board at the top of the carriage gave a temperature of 30 degrees and a speed of 300kmph. We could be astronauts. It was fun to witness the Dali-esque surreality of high speed Spanish landscapes burning in the midday sun as we whooshed through, fighting a flu, dealing with a drippy nose, knitting a pink T. When you smile your body doesn't allow you go back to sleep for 10mins. Your brain expecting to be entertained. Really? says S. No - but its a good theory isn't it? 

The insane Q for the escalator up from the basement platform in Barcelona station where a 12 carriage high speed train, packed to capacity at the height of tourist season had pulled in at the same time as another one, equally packed, from somewhere else. Took us maybe 20mins to escalate up off the platform. Arrived at our hotel, not too shook at all. We’d stayed here maybe 10 years ago and loved it. It was the only “family” room we shared on the trip and might even have been the exact same room from 10 years ago. They’d changed the open kitchen rules somewhat though - not one fucking babybel in sight, nor a smoothie or cute triangular cheese sandwich. 

We ditched our bags and distraught about the babybels, went looking for quick fix food which we found in the form of very good burgers and chips at BACOA. Las Ramblas was a zoo in the mid afternoon heat, a hellswamp-frogchorus of sunburned, needy tourists, with us fully engaged, throatily singing our greedy touristical hearts out. We were failing miserably in my primary pre-trip goal of staying out of the hordes and the heat of mid afternoon. But you gotta live too right? A beautiful city to live in, bohemian, artsy and free, but you'll have to crawl through a densely fragrant tourist stew to do anything as simple as buy a pint of milk. Touristical males blocking pedestrian passageways performing professional photographer Pilates. Annoying as hell I was.

This one actually taken in Madrid

Unsurprisingly, a lot of visible support  - flags, graffiti, street art - for the Palestinian cause on the streets of the capital of separatist Catalonia. I like your camera (multiple times) are you a professional photographer? No but I’m really fucken good! The afro'd waitress at Honest Green in Madrid got it. Pride / Fall. Bought a dinky-mini shaving foam in an dinky-mini Asian convenience store. M jokingly asked me to let her check her Marmageddon bag first. 

 I still had buckets of energy left so I went out taking photographs as the sun in Barcelona, the girls opting to swan on the top floor deck area. A lack of humanity has been a bug in my photography forever, my eye always ceding to the patterned liminality of light on a sidewalk or on the side of  building. Unfortunately the labours of my evening have been lost to criminal statistics. Some of the beautiful light of Barcelona captured on the 2016 trip. Some even more captivating high resolution light was captured on summer evening streets on this trip but will never see the light of publication (by me at least) for reasons related to evaporating material possessions, Liminal Criminals and a train platform in Firenze. The unpredictable will alight and be captured again. 

 

Signor Vino's Favourite Wine & Special Interest Shirt

Signor Vino followed us to Barcelona and we had wine and cripps and watched the sunset over Barcelona before bedtime. 

 

I Love You, You Love Me, Let's Have A Sunset Barney...

 

Ah, Mirror Selfies

Fri 1st | Sat 2nd
Because I was booking our accommodation late-ish and during peak holiday season (ergo peak expense), I’d grabbed prepay deals to offset some of the costs. Some of those hotel deals included breakfast, some did not. So the early morning quest for a good coffee or a wholesome breakfast from a standing start in a new city was another theme of the trip. ChatGPT came into its own for very specific requests based on even more specific geographic constraints [e.g. give me 3 recommended coffee roastery places less than 8mins walk from hotel ideally with an attached bakery serving excellent pastries]. 

My Petite Nomade

Overall through the trip, AI gave us mostly hits in fairness. Myself and M had a truly excellent coffee and close to the worst flat white we’ve ever had all at the very fashionable Nomad Coffee (Petit Nomad). The pastries arrived by bike (AI constraint fail)  during our first coffee but were still not for sale 45mins later. Extreme efficiency and complete inefficiency ride shotgun together through Spanish culture. Same as everywhere I guess, but their coexistence in the same situation seems peculiarly Spanish. 

On the way back to the hotel we picked up the freshest of pastries and some juice for the ladies and had a second breakfast on the rooftop of our hotel. 

 

The story of Sociopathic Cinamon Roll Boy

Then downstairs to try and recreate this shot from forever ago. 

 

Low Flying Time Passing Overhead

Given the tight 24hr turnaround, the 30hr ferry experience ahead of us and the fact that we’d had a fulfilling but quite intense 3 days of culture bludgeonment in Madrid (Give. The. Culture. A. Fucking. Break. Robin), we opted not to go museum hopping, or even revisit the glorious Gaudi landmarks around the place, choosing instead to hit up one of our other collective fascination – stationery. The RAIMA store is 4 floors of pure joy for stationery fans and that’s where we spent the morning. 

 

Stationary

M is very happy with her salmon pink Milan bag. The stationery store in Norway where she bought the girls supplies in remind her of that brand. “Yeah, I love it”. The Beagles on a crosswalk t-shirt. 

Dingle Galway Roadtrip 1994

Me and M swung by a Carrefour supermarket to buy ample provisions for the overnight ferry trip. At the port later, we’d witness a family clutching several recently purchased brown bags of McDonalds meals, stinking up the joint, intermittently dipping in to grab a sneaky bite of a quickly congealing BigMac. A more damning indictment of the infamous lack of quality and astronomical cost of ferry food you’d struggle to find. 

Me and M then hit up an excellent Vegetarian spot for lunch (a revisit from 2016) and had a delicious, nutritious wallop-the-spot meal before entering the nutrition desert of a high seas ferry. The girls opted for a Bubble Tea place where the only alleged nutrition provided was in the form of mini sausage rolls. Thoughts so far? Getting away with it really. We had late checkout for 2pm then we decamped back up to the air-conditioned section of the rooftop area, with its own bar & kitchen area, for a marathon assembly of the sandwich ingredients we’d purchased earlier for the ferry. 

Practicing Uncomfortable-Semi-Cama For The Ferry

Lots of waiting around in intense Friday afternoon Catalonia heat, but what better place to do it than rooftop of Casa Camper? Mostly why I chose it again, also for the nostalgia.  So much more waiting to be done on the ferry. 

5pm taxi to the ferry port driven by a female taxi driver with zero English and a very impaired awareness of the location of the key infrastructure in her city, like I dunno – a ferry port? Google maps + Translate + chaotic scrolling of the Grand Tour doc’s library of QR codes eventually got us there. I was trying to manage the girls expectations of the ferry trip following their very comfortable train journey and nice hotel stays. I told them to think of it like a 24hr Ryanair flight or maybe even a green bus journey that gets stuck in Newbridge traffic for a day and a half. The Ryanair analogy turned out to be most apt as we were bussed randomly around endless concrete-scapes on multiple buses being given an unrequested, unguided tour of the Carparks of Civitavecchia when our intended final destination and our beds for the night was some 80km away.
 

Welcome to the time / space warpfield of GRIMALDI lines

M spotted a French family in great distress at checkin at the port where their scanned digital documents were deemed inadmissible. No discussion entertained. That poor family were now stuck on the edge of a continent at the start of an epic adventure, or maybe somewhere in the middle of it, with no chance of proceeding that day, massively out of pocket with their Grand Tour savagely derailed by borders and bureaucracy. Waves don’t recognise manmade borders. A brutal demonstration of the pleasure and pain implicit in adventure, and a realisation that our Grand Tour could as easily have been stopped in its tracks, knocked back on its heels by some small error or intervention. The lungs of independent travel have a near constant dependency on the oxygen of good fortune. If any one link in our Grand Tour chain had broken, our entire itinerary would have fallen apart and we’d be distraught, broke and stranded. Not a good place to be at peak travel season on the continent of Europe where planes, boats and trains are already booked out weeks and months in advance. It was traumatic to watch the stages of grief that family went through over the 2-3 hours we observed them as we waited for ferry boarding. I don’t believe they left until after our/their boat hit the waves. To kill time, I took long wanders through the queues of vehicles arriving to board our ferry. Such a wild selection of camper vans of every hue, dimension and description. I’m saying now, my next big adventure will be under the awning of Independent Trucking. 

A 2Tonne, 2Tone Grand California

The boarding of the ferry was a complete shitshow - totally unsafe - a cluster bomb of misinformation. Zero useful signage in any language, zero available helpful staff, multiple misdirects from harried and increasingly angry staff. We were looking for the deck number and room for the seats we’d booked. As were hundreds of others, all lugging heavy bags up and down the 2 flights of steel stairs between decks. When the simple act of boarding passengers feels like the chaos of an actual emergency, I shudder to think what a genuine at-sea emergency would look like on a ship this disorganised and under resourced. Similar levels of unbridled chaos when unboarding, no direction given, choke points of hundreds of passengers in narrow cabin passageways. The only consistent message on intercom messages was the clear distinction repeatedly made between truck drivers and all other life forms travelling on the boat, as if heart attacks were contagious. Not sure if that was to keep them away from us or the other way round. We found our seats eventually, stashed our bags and went to eat our Camper sandwiches and settle our nerves. 

Rattled Derattling

Once semi-derattled and happily fed and watered we found more comfortable couches a room or two up the hall and said we’d relax there for a while rather than go straight to the Pullman Dungeon where we’d be spending the rest of the night. All cabins were sold out when I booked the ferry journey maybe 6 weeks prior to our journey. Turns out by claiming some couches. we’d very luckily secured a prime SOFT horizontal surface therefore our sleeping area for the night. 

Trasna Na Donnta On Soft Seats (Nutella Breakfast)

On an overnight ferry, no space is more sacred, more coveted than a horizontal surface. These surfaces are easily colonised using only a cheap bedsheet. But first, you need to get there first. 

Sleeping On A Ferry When You've Missed The Boat Of Horizontality

"Every sailor knows that the sea / Is a friend made enemy / And every shipwrecked soul knows what it is / To live without intimacy"

The concept of personal space is a cruel joke. The Pullman room was dark, overcrowded, stinking and lawless. A lot of pets, small feral children, feral adults, topless, foraging in shopping bags or bags of sweaty fast food while illegally camped on the floors of the sleeping area, no seats booked, floor space claimed, zero enforcement of ticket checks / seat numbers. 

Putting The Grim in Grimaldi :)

It was cloyingly fragrant - mashups of vaguely recognisable smells hung in the air e.g. a 3 day old nappy soaked in ALDI aftershave. Definitely dangerous in any kind of emergency with adult / pet / child bodies strewn on the floors between the seats, along the aisles, blocking the exit areas. When the lights went down it created a hellscape reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch. We had planned on taking two-person shifts upstairs/downstairs to get some sleep, but honestly there was zero rest for mind, body or soul to be had upright in that dark, packed, humid room below decks. I’ve never seen M so shook while travelling (see photo above). She insisted that we not descend into the dungeon again for the remainder of the trip. Lesson learned – I’ll never do an overnight on a ferry where cabins are unavailable. I’ll go countries out of my way by rail to avoid whatever high seas lawlessness that was. 

Morning after onset of acute Ferry Phobia (Ma shell, ma belle)

"Night ended the fight, but the song remained"

I was descending into a bad bout man flu during the night (thanks S! thanks D!) and ended up dozing semi-cama through most of the following day. Including through a stop off in Sardinia which I’d been looking forward to seeing from on deck. M stepped up bigly and took care of us, our camp, our luggage and the doling out our provisions to keep the wolf from the door. I don’t remember much of Saturday at all and only really came to life when we approached Civitavecchia (Chi-VITTA-Vetch-ia) after dark, around 10pm local time. The town where my earlier innocent Ryanair analogy bears most fruit. 

D plugs out some poor hoor's life support machine to charge her phone

Again a lawless, chaotic disembarking. 45mins just to find the deck and door we could leave from, then a long round about walk through a huge carpark, along lines of abandoned 40ft trailers to an un-signposted bus stop. The bus eventually arrives, picks us up and deposits us in another oversized concrete carpark with the whiff of a promise of another bus sometime soon. The promise eventually arrives and drops us at the edge of the town leaving us entirely to our own devices. I’m beginning to develop a phobia of being spat out like a hotsnot after dark in any place I’ve never been before and needing to urgently get my bearings. The pressure and unease increase with dependents. So, this is it - the culmination of 36hrs waiting around, a stress filled, sleep deprived 24hr ferry ride with puddles of intermittent high stress, man flu and no connection booked to get us to Rome, 80km away where our beds for that night were booked. How we’d dreamed of those beds over the past 24hrs. How our tired brains and bodies craved horizontal rest on dry land. We needed to get the next bit right or we’d end up like some Kris Kristoferson B-side, sleeping in the gutter in Civitavecchia, gee-eyed with ferry terror, Sunday morning coming down, deeply regretting our choices. 

"McDonalds Of Civitavecchia" :|

To avert such an outcome, we got on it. We tried phoning a couple of taxi companies. No joy. The girls holed up with the rucksacks at a heaving Saturday night McDonalds as I went off into the night on a quest to secure the equivalent of a party bus from Bundoran to Sligo in the rush hour revelry of a Saturday night. I started by looking for taxis or taxi ranks then switched tactics to calling into hotel receptions and asking them for recommendations. Hard to believe but none of the handful I tried could help me in any way. 

 

"Carparks Of Civitivecchia" @ Vatican. Pretty Accurate.

I finally got chatting to a guy driving a hotel shuttle bus. In a typical interaction with an Italian, after being initially insulted at being mistaken for a lowly taxi driver he helpfully recommended I make my way to the train station in the town. Even though the trains had mostly finished for the night, by law apparently, it was required that there be a minimum of one taxi available for hire at the rank by the station all through the night. Off I sweated the 15min schlepp to the train station and as I arrived, maybe 100m away I spotted the Miracle of Massimiliano an older gentleman just pulling in, driving a big minibus style taxi, about to light a cigarette. Despite my tiredness and distress I somehow closed that 100m gap in the darkness quicker than Carl Lewis determined not to be gazumped by a crew of drunken night clubbers. 

Massimiliano Beseeched By Pilgrim With Ferry Terror

I stated my plight via the liberal use of beseeching hand gestures and immediately got into some hard bargaining with him as he feigned a preference for hanging around indefinitely for the next €10 fare, over a spin up the motorway to Rome and taking a chunk off his mortgage. We eventually came to a semi-gentleman’s agreement – the gentleman piece diluted by the request that the agreed fair be prepaid. We spat on it and I jumped shotgun to drive back to pick up the girls at McDonalds maybe half an hour after I’d left them there. S spotted us first: the rarest of sights - an angelic glow rising off a white Iveco Daily in the Italian night, boasting its very own radial solar mandorla. D later said she felt a level of thankfulness and deep warmth towards the taxi and its occupants that it was almost spiritual. She said Massimiliano looked like a saint on a white horse. We could be heroes. With these semi-traumatised responses it dawned on me that it may have been more stressful for the girls, sitting deep in the heart of chaotic Saturday night downtown Civitavecchia minding the bags with their lives, than it was for me on my sidequest - and it was undoubtedly stressful for me as I ran around like a predatory hitchhiker in the night. 

The Citizens Of Civitivecchia Cheer Our Departing Taxichariot

Long story short, Kris Kristoferson B-Side averted, and we remained on schedule for repatriation with an upholstered horizontal surface. We crossed the Tiber twice before we got to our hotel, but managed to be in bed by 1am. A minor miracle brought to you by Iveco and powered by the Miracle Of Massimiliano.  

Proof That Travel Can Be Glamorous